The Charles W. Morgan arrived at Vineyard Haven harbor to a barrage of cannonfire and boat horns while onlookers gathered to witness her arrival, some in tears. The Morgan is the last wooden whaling ship in the world.

What follows are excerpts from the Gazette’s live blog of the Morgan’s historic voyage from Newport, Rhode Island, to Vineyard Haven on Wednesday, June 18.

This article first appeared in the May/June issue of Martha's Vineyard Magazine.

“For a girl or a woman to embark on a long whaling voyage required great fortitude and determination,” wrote Henry Beetle Hough, co-author with Emma Mayhew Whiting of Whaling Wives, published in 1953. Sailing with her whaling-captain husband meant that a wife could avoid a separation that might last as long as five years, but life as the only woman aboard ship was, said Hough and Whiting, “a prospect of bleakness and hazard.”

The Charles W. Morgan came back to life this spring. The last American wooden whaling ship once again had saltwater under her 173-year-old keel. Ocean winds buffeted her new suit of sails. She has another captain and a new crew occupying bunks and climbing the rigging.

In the log book of the first voyage of the Morgan, 26-year-old second mate James Coffin Osborn of Edgartown relates the joys and agonie of whaling.

Islanders from Nonouti attacked her in the western Pacific. She caught fire off the Azores, shipped seas over her stern during a storm as she approached Cape Horn and steered around mines during World War I. Sailing through and around all this danger while whaling on the far sides of the globe, it’s an irony that the Charles W. Morgan faced her greatest peril three years after she retired and while  lying alongside a wharf just across the Acushnet River from New Bedford, the town she called home port.

Newly seaworthy after a restoration project that spanned seven years, the 19th century whaleship Charles W. Morgan has already graced the ports of Mystic and New London, Conn., and Newport, R.I. Now she’s prepared to welcome visitors in droves throughout the four-day docking at the Tisbury Wharf in Vineyard Haven.

The welcoming ceremony is at noon on Saturday.

At 93, S. Bailey Norton is the oldest living descendant of the first captain of the Charles W. Morgan. Fishing, he says, was what his family knew.